@caseynewton why isn’t there any discussion of the technology. They didn’t record an actress and then string together sounds. This isn’t Siri v1. This voice is entirely synthetic and trained on real audio. So either they hired a single actor and only their input comprisies the training set or they used multiple inputs one or more of which may have been taken without permission. It’s possible it’s Johansson plus other celebrities and they’re afraid to say more. Please ask about the process.
@jonhicks a single listen of a great album may not reveal its secrets. You are kind of loading the dice for hits and ear worms. So many of my favorite records took time. One advantage of CDs and commutes in the pre streaming era. Repetition.
@annaleen good use case for a VR headset. Someone in prime position with good gear films the eclipse. Headset wearers get to stare directly at it in a prime view from anywhere at any time.
Well, it appears our ‘big car’ is fucked, and even if I want to spend the £3-4k I'm being quoted to fix it, I can't find anyone to do the work for months (timing chains = big job).
A lot of new & used cars are so bloody expensive and ugly/unexciting at the moment, and wondering if this is the time to finally make the leap to an EV. We do a lot of miles from Oxfordshire to Glasgow and back, and wonder if the infrastructure is there yet in the UK.
@jonhicks you must have a home charger. Nothing to do with infrastructure. The EV paradigm is having your car charged and ready to go hence a more limited range isn’t a factor because you can access all the range you have every day. That’s another reason not to buy a Tesla. Their battery management is appalling and keeping them fully charged kills them.
This week the US DoJ filed a wide-ranging antitrust case against Apple. The company’s share price tumbled on the growing threat to its highly profitable walled garden, while its cult-like fanboys assured themselves everything would be okay.
@parismarx counterpoint. Apple is the only major supplier of computers and software that doesn’t sell user data as its primary source of income. They aren’t perfect by any measure but do we really see it as a win to have Apple forced to play Google’s game? I and many others choose Apple because I would rather pay for things than ride on “free” services which sell me instead.
@killyourfm@tedium@taylorlorenz great article. I wish the author didn’t refer to blog posts as data. They are works. When someone pirates a movie they aren’t accused to stealing data, they are held accountable for the value taken which can represent hours, years or decades of effort. Reselling blog posts for training LLMs is stealing lifetimes of people’s work.
@christianselig are you converting compression formats/re-encoding or just repackaging? I wonder if people just trying to turn a .mkv into a .mp4 don’t know that can be done in seconds without the hassle in Subler.
@molly0xfff this is the programming equivalent of woodworkers who own thousands of dollars of gear and only ever build workbenches and tool caddies. It’s a very real problem.
@parismarx Apple are screaming from the rooftops that this is an early product focused on developers and designed to make exploring a new paradigm possible. Hence the price. It’s not fair to treat this as if it’s a message for the mainstream. It’s the Lisa, not the Mac.
After a closer look at the Apple Vision Pro reviews & talking to people who’ve used it, my prediction of the most likely path is that its evolution resembles the Apple Watch, which went from big, vague promises to a simple health & notifications device. So, a future Vision Air (or whatever) will ditch external eye displays & complexity and mostly be a very large smart display. You can tell any Mac, iPhone, iPad or Apple TV (maybe HomePod!) to extend to this display. That’s the big, basic deal.
@thomasfuchs@anildash There is a huge age divide here. Just as with iPad and iPhone old people struggle to envisage new paridigms. Old bloggers often call iPads “consumption devices”, young people use them exclusively. Vision Pro will only take shape if and when it’s cheap enough for kids to define. Keeping it expensive dooms it to be defined by the middle aged.
With Safari 17.0 coming out today (for macOS Sonoma, macOS Ventura, and macOS Monterey), it’s a great time to watch Rediscover Safari developer features from WWDC23.
My colleague Patrick will walk you through the new Develop menu, rethought feature flags, redesigned Responsive Design mode, and my favorite — how to use iPhone, iPad, and Vision Pro simulators to easily see how your website or web app will work on these devices.
I hate it when you follow a link to a really great blog post and you're two paragraphs in thinking oh my god this is really good but then a modal popup window from substack asks you to subscribe to this newsletter and you have to hit "continue reading" to finish and then you wonder if this great blog entry will last on someone else's service that may not be around in a few years
@mathowie it saddens me that in 2023 running your own blog is still considered too heavy a lift for most writers. Substack is effectively monetizing a Wordpress stripe integration.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to chip in with domain registrars. Hover and Porkbun are coming in very loud!
The easiest route is to stay with Google Domains and allow it be transferred automatically to Squarespace - but not sure I trust them. My domain name could easily become very expensive with them.
With Google Domains shutting down, I was looking into transferring to Wordpress Domains, but they “don't support transfers of premium domains” which sadly hicks.design is. Other domains are hosted with names.co.uk, but maybe I should at other options? Any recommendations?
@jonhicks Another vote for Hover. Not the cheapest - which is a good thing - and very no nonsense. As a Tucows product the back end is battle tested. No complaints after many years and many other registrars.
“The whole ‘buy property, rent it out’ thing is hurting society and I’m not going to contribute to that,” he said. “If I can, I’d like to say to someone: ‘Have it for a month, live there rent-free and launch your business – and then, if it takes off, you can afford to get a proper shop or an online store.’ That would be amazing.”
@taylorlorenz@caseynewton I am calling dibs on predicting the new Twitter branding. Name: Tooter. Logo: Black cross on white background or poop emoji. The cross will be claimed to be a reference to a cartoon asshole despite being a swastika. Tweets become “Toots”. I am available as a podcast guest.
@taylorlorenz by paying only a hand selected cadre of his friends and admirers Musk has forced every unpaid Twitter contributor to subsidize people like Andrew state through their labor. The complete opacity over whom gets paid makes his increasingly “Lords and Peasants” management style even more unequal.
If anybody is having conversations with Meta about the fediverse and wants to have an experienced exec who has been pushing back on Facebook overreach for as long as they’ve existed, invite me to the call. I’m happy to make time to join.
@anildash The Fediverse needs marketing. Lots of it. Just as Wordpress and Wikipedia do
—but better I hope. The idea that the cream rises and there something “nasty” about communicating the benefits of new things to new people is asinine. If anyone is serious about making this popular and inclusive invite me to a call. I was podcasting in 2004, on WP back then too.
@christianselig I am hoping this is a post that will mark a turning point. If not it will be remembered as a moment of supreme hubris. Either way you wrote one of the great apps. Kudos.